Video serializers/deserializers are known in this field. An example of this type of device is set forth in U.S. Pat. No. 7,030,931, titled “Video Serializer/Deserializer with Embedded Audio Support,” which is assigned to the assignee of this application, and is incorporated into this application in its entirety.
Presently, if circuit board designers want to transmit or receive serial video signals, such as HD-SDI signals, to or from an FPGA video processor, for example, there are two options: i) use a high-speed transceiver I/O on the FPGA, such as the Xilinx Rocket I/Os or the high-speed transceivers on Altera's Stratix GX devices; or ii) connect to an external serializer using a 10-bit parallel interface at 148.5 MHz or a 20-bit parallel interface at 74.25 MHz. Both options pose problems, however, for the designer.
The problems with option i) include: 1) jitter performance of high-speed transceivers; 2) high-cost of FPGA with these transceivers; and 3) limited number of high-speed transceivers (I/Os) on the FPGA. The problems with option ii) include: 1) it uses many I/Os on the FPGA—in many cases the FPGA design can run out of I/Os before running out of logic; 2) because this “parallel interface” is single-ended it is not noise-immune and is not suitable for running across a large PCB; and 3) because this “parallel interface” has numerous traces it is not suitable for running across a backplane or to a daughter card.